Confession: 1971

An Army Insider's Honest Expose of Atrocities in East Pakistan Debacle

by Shehryar Mazari [from South Asia Tribune: March 25, 2005]

http://www.satribune.com/archives/200503/P1_ars.htm

KARACHI, March 25: The East Pakistan tragedy was not just a failure of the military establishment of the day but also the abysmal collapse of civil society in West Pakistan. Launched at midnight, 25 March 1971, the military action went on for nine long months without eliciting any concerted protest from the West Pakistani public and political leadership.

The few low voices raised against the military action were too feeble to make the army change the suicidal course it had set itself, leading to an ignominious military defeat and the breakup of the country.

Brigadier Abdul Rehman Siddiqi, who headed the Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) and was Press Advisor to Army Chief General Yahya Khan, was clearly in the thick of things. Therefore, his book 'East Pakistan: The Endgame — An Onlooker’s Journal 1969-1971' will be of interest to those wishing to penetrate the historical veil that has subsequently been draped over the more unsavory events of that era.

The author had the unique advantage of observing the tragedy as it unfolded. As the ISPR chief, he interacted with the national press and a cross-section of public and political leadership in both wings. In his description and appraisal of the various dramatis personae, he acts as an impartial observer.

Apart from the fresh light the book sheds on the traumatic episode, the simplicity and candor of the narrative adds much to its readability. Thus, the book may well contribute towards the much-needed bridge building between Pakistan and Bangladesh.

"In 1971, Pakistan was torn into two, its eastern half declaring itself the independent nation of Bangladesh. While the broader details of this debacle have since become comprehensible, historians are still trying to glean a few remaining facts from the myths and half-truths that continue to linger some 33 years later.

From the start, the author makes it clear that the book is based on his diaries and other sources that he had personal access to as the ISPR chief. He also admits to have “scrupulously avoided” relying on any subsequent books or other published material that relates to the events. As a result, the reader is presented with a first-hand account of those fateful days.

The narrative begins in February 1969 when President Ayub Khan, besieged by street agitation, sought to negotiate his way out by calling for a Round Table Conference (RTC). However, as Siddiqi explains, Yahya had already started plotting against his boss. Unknown to most people at the time, the army chief secretly met the East Pakistani leader Mujibur Rehman and asked him not to relent on his demands. In fact, as Siddiqi points out, Yahya went as far as to tell Mujib that “he could go ahead with his anti-Ayub campaign without any let or hindrance from the army.”

Siddiqi also reveals that a week before the RTC, he was ordered by General Ghulam Umar to secretly prepare an advance draft for Yahya’s address to the nation as the Chief Martial Law Administrator. Two days later, Yahya flatly refused Ayub’s direct request for the army to come to the aid of the civil government.

According to Siddiqi, Yahya made it abundantly clear to his superior that it was either complete martial law under his own control or nothing. And Ayub knew then that his days were numbered. Following his refusal to help Ayub quell the violent civic unrest, Siddiqi discloses how Yahya cunningly enlisted the support of his old drinking buddy interior minister Admiral AR Khan, who persisted in presenting highly pessimistic daily briefs to further undermine the president.

When Siddiqi confronted General Pirzada with these peculiar goings-on, he was politely told to hush up. The dice had been cast and within a month Ayub departed from the scene after handing over power to Yahya.

Following the takeover, Siddiqi claims that Yahya was quick to reveal his true intentions and confided to some of his senior officers: “Gentlemen, we must be prepared to rule this unfortunate country for the next 14 years or so.”

Soon, Yahya announced general elections after being convinced by the intelligence agencies that they would result in a split vote and a fractious National Assembly, making it impossible for the new government to fulfil the stipulation of an approved constitution within 120 days. This failure, the thinking went, would then lead to fresh elections while power would indefinitely remain in the army’s firm grip.

However, the election results could not have been farther from Yahya’s calculations. Badly let down by the intelligence agencies, Yahya decided to pursue a new course of action. His famous reference to Mujib as the future prime minister was in reality no more than “a calculated maneuver aimed at, first to set the military against Mujib, and second, to provoke the Pakistan Peoples Party.”

The worried generals then recruited Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to ensure that any chance of a compromise with Mujib would be non-existent. In fact, as Siddiqi informs us, General Umar even met many West Pakistani minority party leaders to actively dissuade them from attending the first National Assembly session at Dhaka. Not surprisingly, East Pakistan soon went on the boil in the face of such intransigence. And the army-controlled West Pakistani media retaliated by accusing East Pakistanis of treason.

We all know what followed. The army’s subjugation of East Pakistan resulted in untold misery for millions of innocent Pakistanis, the death of many thousands as well as the breakup of Jinnah’s original Pakistan. And as Siddiqi’s narrative makes apparent, all this happened so that the generals could maintain their hold on power. Since then, it has suited successive army generals to place the blame on Bhutto. But the pertinent question is: how many tanks, guns and soldiers did Bhutto have at his disposal? The answer, of course, is none.

Another fact the author emphasizes is the sheer profusion of war crimes inflicted on hapless Pakistani citizens by its own army. The reader comes across a devastated Major General Ansari telling Siddiqi that rape and brutality were widespread. The general also confesses to a complete breakdown in the “discipline of his junior officers [and that] there was little he could do to check their "atrocities.” If junior officers had run amok, one shudders to think what the less-educated jawans got up to.

Siddiqi also exposes the infamous General Niazi who shamelessly defended the rapists by declaring that: “You cannot expect a man to live, fight and die in East Pakistan and go to Jhelum for sex, would you?” Even 30-plus years later, the fact that most, if not all, of these perpetrators got away scot-free, can provoke tears of rage and shame.

Ultimately, 'The End Game' is a brave and honest book and Siddiqi should be commended for writing it, even if it took him all these years to muster the resolve. A must-read for anyone interested in Pakistan’s past." - Courtesy Herald

India-Bangladesh Relationship

Meanwhile, In The East :Bangladesh conducts mock exercises...a new flank?

by Saikat Datta [from Outlook, Apr. 25, 2005]

http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20050425&fname=Assam+%28F%29&sid=1



On April 24, Assam Governor Lt General Ajai Singh wrote to the PMO about a fresh wave of reports emanating out of Bangladesh indicating a security threat to India's Northeast region. In his letter, Ajai Singh noted that "there is cause for concern" and that it needed to be looked at closely and action taken at the earliest. In fact, he was reiterating concerns expressed by his predecessor Lieutenant General S.K. Sinha (retd) before he moved to Jammu and Kashmir.

Singh also pointed at fresh reports indicating that new fundamentalist groups were emerging which could pose a serious threat to the Northeast, particularly the sensitive Siliguri corridor which links the region to mainland India.

In fact, Singh's letter corroborates inputs provided by security agencies and an army assessment. It is not as if Bangladesh is preparing to wage war with India. But the army has it that Bangladesh army is preparing for low-intensity conflicts in which it would lend a covert hand to insurgent groups in the region.

What has caused concern among Indian security agencies is a document showing the Bangladesh army (BA) conducting an exercise called Ex-Destranor-17, a mock unconventional warfare "behind enemy lines" supported by conventional logistic support. Conducted under the 66 Infantry Division of the BA, it happened "2.5 km inside enemy territory with conventional logistic support" and with "support from local population assuming that not all of them are friendly". The exercise was conducted from April 15 to 23 last year and troops were drawn from the 16th, 72nd and 222nd infantry brigades. The lessons from it have now been factored in.

South Block sources say the army top brass has also expressed concerns about the BA's move to improve its offensive capabilities. Reports have been received that the BA has raised seven new armoured regiments to be used in a purely offensive role. In fact, worried about the vulnerability of the Siliguri corridor, the army recently moved some of its formations deployed in Jammu and Kashmir during Operation Parakram to the region.

An Indian army assessment has also pointed to the renewed activities of several fundamentalist organisations in Bangladesh and their impact on the region's overall security. Among others, the report names Jamaat-e-Islami and Islamic Chhatra Shibir, organisations which have maintained an anti-India stance. However, the emergence of new organisations like Jagrata Muslim Janata BD, the assessment says, is cause for worry. While the Jamaat-e-Islami is a part of the four-party alliance in Bangladesh, other bodies like the Harkat-ul-Jihadi-al-Islami have also made Indian intelligence agencies see red. The assessment notes that its activities in areas bordering West Bengal and Assam are cause for worry. According to the report, the organisation has now changed its name to Islamic Samaj Kalyan Parishad with a youth wing called the Jamat-ul-Mujahideen.

While India is watching the ongoing developments within Bangladesh, analysts say the continuing illegal immigration can no longer be ignored. "There are reports that all long-term perspective plans drawn up by the Bangladesh Army look at India as their area of concern which is worrying," says a senior army official.

The Border Security Force has also raised the issue of illegal immigration with its counterpart, the Bangladesh Rifles, in several meetings. While Bangladesh has maintained that there is no illegal immigration, the bsf has pointed out that several terrorist groups operating against India are based in Bangladesh.

Kashmir's Endless Autumn

by Rehana Hakim [from Counter-Currents:18 November 2004]

http://www.countercurrents.org/kashmir-hakim181104.htm


Where or how does one begin? Three weeks of reflection after a five-day journey into "forbidden land" yield only one absolute truth: in Kashmir - Jammu, the valley and 'Azad' - there is no absolute truth.

And in the myriad faces of the conflict that has spanned 57 years and claimed tens of thousands of lives, there are no winners.

So where does one begin?

At the very beginning of the first-ever trip in 57 years to Indian-administered Kashmir by a group of Pakistani journalists? That would be the meeting in Anantnag with Mehbooba Mufti - Kashmir's answer to Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto - the supremely confident and articulate daughter of Jammu and Kashmirs' chief minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed. Or does one start with the scion of the 'Lion' of Kashmir's family, the suave Omar Abdullah, who holds Pakistan responsible for most of J&K's travails. Does one focus on JKLF's angry young man, Yasin Malik, who accuses the "imperialist Punjabis" from both sides of the divide of deciding the fate of Kashmir without taking the Kashmiris' aspirations into account. Or should the curtain open to the APHC's Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who staunchlyopposes reopening the bus route between Muzaffarabad and Srinagar because he believes it will dilute the Kashmir problem.

Perhaps one should start at the other end of the ideological divide - at the camps of the Pandits in Jammu, who fled the valley after the latest insurgency erupted and who accuse the Pakistani media of never failing to report on the "excesses" on Kashmiris by the security personnel but ignoring the "genocide" of Pandits by the militants. Or should one just plunge into the heart of the issue: the homes of hundreds of those Kashmiris who have lost fathers, husbands and sons to security forces, to the freedom struggle or to militancy, and been left at the mercy of the state apparatus?

Kashmir is tricky terrain. It's like walking a minefield. Passions and tempers run high. There is a high degree of skepticism, cynicism, and of suspicion - borne understandably of 57 years of a closed-door policy - when a delegation of 16 journalists sponsored by the South Asia Free Media Association (SAFMA) arrives in Jammu and Kashmir as guests of The Kashmir Times.

The opening salvo is fired by Asiya Andrabi, leader of the Dukhtaran-e-Millat, a right-wing women's group that hit the headlines in 1992 for reportedly trying to implement their version of the Islamic code of dress and throwing acid on some women who refused to cover their faces.

Speaking at an impromptu press conference at one of her many hideouts, Andrabi, who is currently a fugitive from the law, alleges that the visit is sponsored by the Indian government, and that the delegates are guests of pro-India political parties and the army. She demands to know why Pakistani journalists have been allowed to enter J&K, when Amnesty International and other human rights groups have been denied permission. Andrabi describes the visit as part of a "diabolical plan" for Musharraf's sellout on Kashmir. Andrabi is not the only one who has reservations about the trip.

JKLF's Yasin Malik feels the delegation has compromised the legal status of Kashmir by travelling on Indian visas. The APHC's Syed Ali Shah Geelani is not pleased that Doda, Baramulla, Rajouri - the areas that have borne the brunt of the army's excesses - have not been included in the itinerary. And the Kashmir Bar Council takes the journalists to task for partaking of wazwan (Kashmir's gourmet cuisine) with state functionaries. In short, we are put on the defensive from the word go.

No, we are not representing Musharraf, Manmohan Singh, or the US; no, we have no agenda; no, we do not represent any government; no, we have no roadmap on Kashmir; no, we offer no solutions; no, we are not the UN Secretary-General.

We are lambasted time and again for travelling on Indian visas, till an irritated Imtiaz Alam, SAFMA's head honcho, responds with: "How come you don't question Hurriyat leaders who travel on Indian passports?" That clinches the argument.

Andrabi's tirade aside, no one, with any shade of political opinion, would miss an opportunity to meet a corps of Pakistani journalists.

The 76-year-old Syed Ali Shah Geelani, often branded an ISI agent by the Indian media, meets us at the Tehreek-i-Hurriyat headquarters in Hyderpore. He remains firm on his stand: J&K's accession to Pakistan. He sees no other option. "An independent Kashmir will become a playing field for vested interests," he states in categorical terms. "There has to be a plebiscite in accordance with UN resolutions." He warns against an Afghanistan-like U-turn on Kashmir and even opposes the proposal of soft borders and free travel between the two Kashmirs. He fears it would dilute the Kashmir problem. "Even if India were to pave the streets of Kashmir with gold, it would not atone for the blood of its martyrs," says Geelani.

Questioned about the differences within the APHC's ranks, he says there are none. "Only those people who violated the party's constitution by contesting in the 2002 polls were suspended." Told to prove his electoral strength by contesting an election, he says, "I will do so only under UN observers. The Indians would rig elections to embarrass me."

Unlike APHC's hardliners, the moderate faction of the APHC, led by Maulana Abbas Ansari, accuses Islamabad of scuttling any peace moves by funding a plethora of agencies to foment trouble in Kashmir. "We never thought a symbol of political unity would be broken up by its mentor," fumes Abdul Ghani Bhat, the former Hurriyat Chairman. He says he tore up an earlier will in which he had expressed a desire to be buried in Pakistan. The Ansari group, however, claims to have a blueprint for a settlement of the Kashmir dispute which would be acceptable to all three sides and which would take into account the "sensitivities, security concerns, economic interests and national honour of all three as well as the functional togetherness of different regions of J&K."

Sheikh Abdullah's son-in-law, G.M. Shah, a former chief minister of J&K who heads the JK Awami National Conference, proposes what he calls "the mother of all confidence-building measures" - an intra-Kashmir conference to hammer out a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

The walls of the entrance to the house where we meet the J&K Democratic Front Party's Chief, Shabbir Ahmed Shah, are a testimony to the violence in Kashmir: pasted all over are snapshots of hundreds of bullet-riddled, tortured bodies of those killed in the valley.

"India should stop custodial killings, release detained political activists, withdraw the Public Safety Act under which people can be detained for two years without any trial, set up a Kashmir Committee headed by a man like Vajpayee to carry the peace process forward, and it should include Kashmiris."

Any implication that the militants have hijacked Kashmir's freedom movement are cast aside. "We are grateful to the militants for taking the Kashmir issue out of cold storage and pushing it centrestage," he says. "In any case, they are mostly locals and, those who are not, will go back home once the peace initiatives begin to show results. Before 1989, no one carried even a penknife. The Kashmir issue is a political issue and it has to be resolved politically," he says categorically.

The most passionate, and the most volatile of the separatists, is the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) Chairman, Yasin Malik. Unlike Shabbir Shah who breaks into a smile every now and then, the lean, wiry Yasin appears grim, pensive, angst-ridden. There is an impenetrable barrier of reserve. But as the 38-year-old freedom fighter, who has spent 15 years in jail, off and on, in Srinagar, Jodhpur and Tihar, begins to speak to the Pakistani media at the party headquarters in Maisuma, the reserve boils over into seething rage.

There is overwhelming anger at the Kashmiris being left out of the dialogue process. "Are we a pack of animals?" he asks angrily. "This is not a border dispute between India and Pakistan that has to be resolved by its rulers. The solution has to be in consonance with Kashmir's aspirations."

In the last 16 months, Malik has gone from village to village collecting signatures of the people of J&K demanding that they be allowed to determine their own future - 16 lakh signatures at last count. He accuses the Indian government of wanting to change the demographic character of J&K.

Yasin is dismissive of the 2002 state assembly polls. "According to the Election Commission, the Chief Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, secured only 2,81,000 votes in the entire state. Besides only 20 per cent of the population participated in the polls, which means 80 per cent boycotted the polls on our call. So who was defeated?"

He reads extracts from the works of the well known Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali's collection, A Country Without a Post Office (Shahid died of cancer at age 55 in the US), copies of which he gifts to all the delegates:

"When the muezzin died,the city was robbed of every call.
The houses were swept about like leaves for burning.
Now every night we buryour houses - and theirs, the ones left empty.
We are faithful. On their doors we hang wreaths.
More faithful each night fire again is a walland
we look for the dark as it caves in."

Agha Shahid's father, the erudite Agha Ashraf Ali, a former professor of political history, is scathing in his comments, but his contempt is not reserved for India alone. He refers to India and Pakistan as the "pipsqueaks with their little bombs," and ends on a telling note: "Leave us to our own devices, we will manage. The Kashmiris will have the last laugh."

In Srinagar, both expectations and passions run highS Every Kashmiri you run into at Srinagar's Broadway Hotel wants five minutes of your time; wants you to understand his trauma, his suffering, his pain; wants you to hear his story - and there are many, many stories. Stories of missing sons, abused daughters; stories of women whose husbands have gone missing and widows; abandoned orphans, destitute families and charred properties.

Each more poignant than the other.

There's Parveena Ahangar, whose son has been missing for the past 17 years. A college student, he was picked up by security forces from his house at three o'clock in the morning. Since then Parveena has been running from army cantonments to prison cells to government offices demanding to know the whereabouts of her son. She believes he's been killed. "At least, give me his body to bury," the mother cries in anguish.

Ahangar now heads an organisation called Parents of Disappeared Persons (PADP). She takes Ary Televison's Syed Talat Hussain in a rickshaw to meet other parents of missing children. In her neighbourhood alone, there are apparently 60 such cases.

At Syed Ali Shah Geelani's press briefing, a dozen or so women approach the female journalists. One of them holds The News' foreigncorrespondent, Mariana Baabar's hand and cries out aloud as she talks of how life has become a veritable hell ever since her husband decided to join the militants. She lifts her pheran (long Kashmiri outer garment) to reveal a big gash in her stomach. She accuses the security forces of torturing and tormenting her. "My young daughters are summoned to the army camp every now and then," she says. We are told to visit Doda, Baramulla, Budgam and Rajouri that are teeming with stories like hers.

We hear the sorry tale of Pattan, an entire village which was burnt down as "retribution" when some army personnel were killed. Another village, we are told, was torched when the security forces found a militant holed up in one of the houses in the area.

"Is it fair to punish an entire village because a militant has sought refuge in one home?" says an angry Kashmiri shopkeeper. "In many cases the militants don't enter our homes with our permission. They just barge in." He recalls the time when a group of eight militants forced their way into his house, when he was away at work. His sisters were forced to vacate their room. "The visitors, from Jaish I suspect, didn't harass anyone, but they mounted their guns, and stayed and prayed through the night. Before they left early the next morning, my family made breakfast for them and they insisted on paying for a pack of butter they had asked my brother to get from a corner shop. But till the time they were there, my family was on tenterhooks."

Suddenly, our hitherto forthcoming shopkeeper is struck by the realisation that talking to us might cost him dearly. "Please don't reveal my identity," he pleads. "If the security forces find out, they will lock me up on charges of harbouring terrorists." His fear is palpable. As is the fear of a hotel employee who looks around to see if anyone is listening as he informs me about his son, a college student, who was constantly being approached by militants to join the freedom movement. He pulled his son out of college and found him employment elsewhere. "Please don't disclose my name," he beseeches "or else I'll be in deep trouble."

In Kashmir, the battle lines are drawn: 'Either you are with us - the militants or the security forces - or you are against us. And whichever side you are on, prove it.' There is no sitting on the fence, no such entity as neutral observer. One is constantly looking over one's shoulder to see who's eavesdropping. "But some Kashmiris have learnt the art of survival," says a Delhi-based reporter. "They'll give the ISI or a Pakistani one story, they'll gave RAW or an Indian another."

However, at Srinagar's Kashmir University with 4,000 students on the roll, there is just one storyS

SAFMA's Imtiaz Alam throws a simple question at the 20 students who have been chosen for an interface with SAFMA delegates: If they had to choose between India, Pakistan and independence, what would they opt for?

"Total independence" is the overwhelming response. They don't wish to merge with either India or Pakistan. "Firstly we'd like a reunification of the Indian and Pakistan-administered parts of Kashmir, plus the part that is with China, and then we want independence." But even as they speak, around 50 to 60 students carrying placards raise slogans of "Azadi ka matlab kiya? La illaha illalah," "Pakistan Zindabad," and "Jeevay, jeevay Pakistan." Some say they want 'Nizam-e-Mustafa.' Asked whether they know what it implies in practical terms, they are vague.

The students complain to Pakistani TV anchors, Talat Hussain of Ary, Munizae Jahangir of Geo and Mujahid Barelvi of Indus TV, on camera, that they were not informed about the Pakistani media team's visit and that their university's principal unilaterally decided on the list of students and faculty members who would be allowed to meet the journalists. The number of protesting students swells to roughly 300, all wanting to be heard. The media team has to be moved to the main auditorium of Gandhi Bhavan next door to hear them all.

The anger here pulsates through the hall. They want azadi, azadi, azadi. "Politics is not allowed on the campus," Kashmir University's vice chancellor had said earlier in response to my query. But obviously you can't drown the cry of freedom.

Asked if the faculty has done any definitive study on the Kashmir question or examined possible resolutions of the dispute, Professor Noor Mohammed Baba, head of the political science department, acknowledges that no such study has been possible because of the "pressures from both sides - the government and the militants. Everyone has gone through a traumatic experience and free expression is not possible."

The university has had its share of problems. The early '90s saw the departure of a major chunk of the faculty, primarily comprising the Pandits, who were highly educated. They couldn't withstand the pressures of the volatile political situation. They were among the three lakh Pandits who left the valley in the wake of what they say was a "calculated genocide" to drive the Pandits out of the valley. Only 18,000 Pandits chose to stay behind. "The community's unity has been lost," says a Muslim teacher. "We never thought in terms of Muslims and Pandits, but the violence has pulled us apart. A cultural erosion has taken place."

As we drive into Muthi, a 10 km drive from Jammu, crowds carrying placards denouncing the violence against Kashmiri pandits dot the landscape. This is one of the 500 camps spread all over Jammu, where displaced Kashmiri Pandits have taken sanctuary.

They live in tiny, 10x10 one-room tenements, each with a small kitchenette, but communal bathrooms. The affluent among them have moved to Delhi, Mumbai and other cities.

Shouting, screaming men converge on us from all sides as we settle down, amidst much jostling and pushing. They are livid at having had to leave the comfort of their homes and live in squalor. They blame the Pakistan government for continuing to sponsor cross-border terrorism and militancy in Kashmir. The Pakistani media is also ticked off for highlighting human rights violations by security forces in Kashmir, but failing to mention "the barbarism perpetrated by militants."

"This amounts to ethnic cleansing," says Ashwini Kumar Chrangoo, chief of the Panun Kashmiri Movement, an organisation for displaced Kashmiri Pandits.

Separatist leaders, however, allege that it was the J&K Governor, Jagmohan, who manoeuvered the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits from Srinagar and communalised the issue. Says the Democratic Freedom Party's Shabbir Shah, "We have asked the Pandits to return to the valley. We will protect them with our lives."

But the mood in the camp is one of fury. "We are not ready for another migration. We want a separate homeland within the valley, carved from the north and east side of the Jhelum valley." And they say that they too want to be included in the talks on the Kashmir issue.

They have a parting request to make: they want the Pakistan government to take steps to renovate the Sharda temple, an ancient shrine of Kashmiri Pandits in Azad Kashmir, and make it possible for them to visit it. The queue of people wanting to visit family, friends and religious sites on the other side of the divide is long... and growing.

Ram Lal, 88, grabs hold of Tahir Naqqash, Dawn's correspondent in Muzaffarabad, and enquires about friends he left behind at the time of Partition: Lassu Ju, Wali Ju, Usman Bhoriwalla. Ram Lal lived in a refugee camp in Muzaffarabad for five months. A Pathan saved his 10-month-old daughter from a fire. The girl is now a professor - and 57-years down the road, Lal's heart is still full of gratitude. He anxiously awaits the start of the bus service between Muzaffarabad and Srinagar.

As does Daljeet Singh, an employee of the Food Corporation of India, who hails from Chakothi Village in Muzaffarabad. He has named his house in Nanak Nagar, 'Chakothi,' after his 82-year-old father's village. His father refers to the house as "Chakothi, sone di kothi" (Chakothi, house of gold), as he regales his grandchildren with stories of his village where he was a numberdar.

Naqqash himself is meeting his family, including his maternal uncle, for the first time. How was the reunion?

"Very emotional," he chokes, "we barely talked. We simply held hands and cried." Naqqash's father, who died three years ago, lived in Srinagar till 1956, and in his last days would often ask his son; "Bus chal rahi hai? Main ghar jaana chahta hoon." (Is the bus service operating? I want to go home).

The channels of communication between the two Kashmirs have been abysmal. In fact, the minute one landed in Srinagar, telecommunication links with Pakistan died. Even the satellite phones of Ary and Geo correspondents wouldn't work.

One learnt that Jammu and Kashmir's residents could make International Subscriber Dialling (ISD) calls to anywhere in the world - except Pakistan. The Indian Defence Ministry withdrew the facility after the border buildup in June 2001 and people wishing to make calls to Pakistan had to drive down to Lakhanpur or outside the state. The status quo remains.

Mobile phones have been allowed in the valley only recently, but the service is hampered by the usual glitches. Newspapers are full of letters complaining about dead mobiles. In the area of Boulevard and Dalgate, for instance, mobiles had been dead for three weeks, with the "network busy" signal coming on each time anyone dialled.

Finally, the governments of the two countries are beginning to consider the proposal of allowing travel between the two Kashmirs. But differences remain over the documents to be used: while the Pakistan government proposes travel on UN documents, so as not to compromise Pakistan's position on the LoC status, the Indian government insists that visitors travel on the passports of their respective countries.

Not everyone views the concept of soft borders and free travel between the two Kashmirs favourably. APHC's Syed Ali Shah Geelani maintains that the move is designed to dilute the Kashmir problem. He fears that once people-to-people contacts begin, the dispute will be consigned to the backwaters. "We have not sacrificed a hundred thousand lives, just for opening up the borders," says Geelani angrily. The PDP chairperson, Mehbooba Mufti, disagrees vehemently. "It's not just about an international border, it's about a people. If I had my way, I would say no documents at all. There is a human dimension to this tragedy that needs to be dealt with urgently. Moreover, the bus travel would boost our respective economies too. Our crates of Sopore apples should be able to fetch cash instead of guns."

J&K Chief Minister Mufti Sayeed's daughter, Mehbooba, an MP and President of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is among the more articulate young voices emerging from Kashmir. Clad in an abaya, with a scarf covering her head, she seems perfectly at ease and fully in charge in an all-male domain. A colleague refers to her as 'mahi munda.'

Mehbooba Mufti maintains that the valley is becoming safe for its residents and that they can actually step out after sundown, never mind that the dak bungalow in Anantnag, where she meets us, is teeming with hundreds of security personnel, and an APC with a jamming device is parked nearby. "My father's 'healing touch' policy is actually working," she says. "He has ordered the release of all those people who are languishing in jail despite completing their terms. Additionally, security personnel who were guilty of excesses against innocents are being taken to task."

The PDP President impresses with her candour and steals a march over her father. As does Omar Abdullah, who leads the main opposition, the National Conference. Unlike his father, Farooq Abdullah, often referred to as the "disco chief minister who spent more time hobnobbing with Delhi socialites and Bollywood queens than he did with his constituents," Omar ("drop-dead gorgeous" by at least one young colleague's account) appears extremely focused. And he does not mince his words when he says that in his view the Kashmir problem is largely of Pakistan's making.

"We grew apples, we grew peaches, we grew pears. We didn't grow guns," he says angrily. "A neighbour took advantage of our sense of alienation, disillusionment, disenchantment and a people who were peace-loving have turned violent." He laments the loss of his party workers at the hands of people "who came from across the border." Ask if state terrorism is justified, and he retorts, "What came first - the terrorists or the state perpetrators?" But Kashmiris want independence, you say. Does his party too? "I do not want to promise anything that we cannot deliver, we don't sell dreams we cannot fulfill. Our vision has to be grounded in reality."

NC stands for maximum autonomy within the Indian constitution. "We will strive for the kind of autonomy the state enjoyed originally under Article 370 in 1952," says Omar. However, if the composite dialogue throws up anything else, we will not stand in the way." He sounds a note of caution: "You have to include all factions of the APHC. You can't split the party and talk to just one group."

The battle over India's 'atoot ang' (integral part) and Pakistan's 'shahrag' (lifeline) has extracted a heavy toll: 100,000 dead, among them 18,251 militants, 4,471 security personnel and 15,121 civilians according to unofficial estimates. Sand-bagged bunkers, olive green trucks, APCs, barbed wires and cocked rifles have become a part of the landscape. As have the Border Security Force (BSF), the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and the Jammu and Kashmir Police. Among them is the young, attractive Zohra, mother of two, who we run into at the Jammu Women's police station. She joined the police force after her husband, a driver in the police force, was killed by militants.

Life couldn't be easy for the forces either: the 'enemy,' whatever his colour, is unrelenting. There have been suicides, nervous breakdowns, desertions, and reports of service-men pulling the trigger on fellow officers.

But the brunt of this never-ending tragedy has been borne by the ordinary Kashmiri. Human rights groups produce list upon list of persons who have been picked up either by the security forces or the militants and disappeared in the black holes of Jammu and Kashmir. Here there is an all-pervasive rage, and alongside a sense of hopelessness, a sense of a helplessness, a feeling of having been betrayed by those who perforce control their destiny: India, Pakistan, and the Kashmiri leadership. Says Muslim Jan, an educationist, "My soul has been destroyed. I feel a void within. Each time a euphoria is created, but the reality is different - it's not a step towards the grand narrative. A low intensity conflict can upset the apple cart any time."

Azadi, it seems, is still a long way from Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali's dream for his country without a post office...

"We shall meet again, in Srinagar,
by the gates of the Villa of Peace,
our hands blossoming into fists
till the soldiers return the keys
and disappear. "

- Agha Shahid Ali [ The Country Without A Post Office ]

Ashis Nandy

Freud, modernity and postcolonial violence:
Analytic attitude, dissent and the boundaries of the self

by Ashis Nandy [The Little Magazine: vol iv: issue 5 & 6]

http://www.littlemag.com/looking/ashisnandy.html

We live in an intellectual edifice primarily built by the European Enlightenment. It is not very old, having been given its final shape less than three hundred years ago, and our concepts of an ideal society and meaningful social criticism are coloured by this heritage. However, this said, we also have to confront the uncomfortable reality that these concepts of a desirable society and desirable forms of social criticism invoke altogether different associations in other parts of the world. These other associations have acquired new play in recent years because the Enlightenment vision itself has, finally, come under scrutiny in North America and Western Europe. Indeed, the rumours about its complicity with the violence of our times have been given a certain edge by a whole range of work.

Take for example the crisis in the Middle East. Jerusalem is on the one hand an ancient city of spiritual and moral grace, and on the other, a city of violence, uprooting and divided selves. Simone Weil and Martin Buber, I suspect, lived with the first Jerusalem, the modern Israelis live with the second. For the former, Jerusalem not only had secular and sacred geographies, but also moral and psychological ones. The latter seem to oscillate between their passion for an Israeli nation-state delicately perched on the desperate denial of a West Asian identity and a fierce commitment to a secular, modern European identity, precariously balanced on memories of massive suffering and projects of annihilation, once so lovingly designed by Europe for its Jewish population. The denial goes with a refusal to acknowledge that the Arabs and the Jews are often not divided by distance but by proximity. The commitment goes with the search for a magical remedy for remembered discrimination and genocide in the values of the European Enlightenment, presum ably in the belief that a European disease requires European therapy. The search reaffirms an identity that many can neither disown nor fully own up to.

I shall use as my baseline what one of the greatest ever products of the Jewish tradition, Sigmund Freud, who lived much of his life with an ambivalent aware ness of his cultural-religious status, might have said about the bitterness that has come to surround Jerusalem. Namely, that the narcissism of small differences and familiarity is often a better predictor of ethnic discontents and violence in our age than distance and ignorance. I am told that in the late nineteenth century a Belgian anthropologist, finding it difficult to ethnographically distinguish between the Hutus and the Tutsis, ultimately decided to distinguish between the two tribes by the number of heads of cattle they owned. When the Rwandan genocide took place, that story became one of the ways of acknowledging what many anthropologists always knew, that the Hutus and Tutsis were two tribes that, apart from being neighbours, were closest to each other ethnographically. There is a parallel to this in the Bosnian situation too. About 30 per cent of the Bosnian Muslims, one hears, are related to the Serbs by marriage.

I simultaneously want to use as my baseline some of the popular forms that the Enlightenment values have taken in the global middle-class culture to serve as the heart of a global structure of common sense. This is important because these values now shape our concepts of the normal, the rational and the sane, both within and outside the clinic. I shall also lay my cards on the table and confess that I am suspicious of the claim that Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries answered all basic questions of humankind once and for all, that all it left for the other civilisations to do is to write a few polite footnotes and useful appendices to these answers.

The body of work that challenges the Enlighten ment vision, when not directly dependent on psychoanalytic insights, has borrowed heavily from clinical work and therapeutic visions. Why?

One reason could be that the first psychoanalyst was a rebellious child of the Enlighten ment. He did not reject the Enlightenment vision, but the social critique he offered was not from the vantage ground of the Enlightenment’s standard ideas of a desirable society and knowledge. He tried to supply a critique of the Enlightenment reason from within its perimeters but while doing so, often accidentally strayed into strange territories. Indeed, his crypto-Platonic worldview was more open-ended than it had seemed at one time. Scholars have located in Freud’s work a whole range of new elements — from German romanticism and Naturphilosophie and the more open-ended concept of science associated with that tradition, to the East European, Hassidic-Jewish culture and mystical tradition that occasionally broke through his public self and overdone conformity to the model of the positive sciences.[1] As he gained confidence in his middle years, he returned to some of the philosophical and civilisational questions that had always haunted him. Books like Civilisation and its Discontents, The Future of an Illusion, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Moses and Monotheism and Thoughts for the Times on War and Death could be read as ‘regressions’ to a more defiant and daring mode of psychological theorisation. These works are more Dostoyevskyan and more informed by his tragic vision of life. They show that Freud was no intellectual kin of Francis Bacon, though sometimes, in his cultural and intellectual insecurity, he appeared or pretended to be so. At least one commentator has felt compelled to say that Freud’s tragic vision implied a rejection of ‘the simplest Anglo-American belief in the virtues of progress.’[2]

Unfortunately, despite the rediscovery of psychoanalysis by literary theory and cultural studies in the last decade, this other Freud, a product of multiple cultural traditions who tries to negotiate cultural borders, remains a stranger to many. The limited cultural sensitivities of some of the mainstream schools of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis partly derive from this. These schools seem to be unaware that even modernity is no longer what it was, that four hundred years is a long time in human history; even the Dark Ages in Europe did not last that long. Today modernity, to qualify as such, requires an element of self-criticism or at least a sense of loss. The problem is compounded by the various schools of post-Freudian psychology, which are mostly progenies of the theoretical frames that crystallised as forms of dissent within the Enlighten ment. Even when they defy the modern, the defiance is primarily addressed to and remains confined within the citadels of modernity. The ones that try to break out of the grid often turn out to be transient fashions of brief shelf life. A culture not only produces its own ideas of conformity but also its distinctive concepts of valid or sane dissent. Worse, what looks like dissent in one culture at one time may not appear so in another culture at another time. Let me give an example.

When Freud’s ideas first came to India in the first decade of the last century, it was remarkable how little protest they aroused.[3] There was no frenzied opposition to them as there was in Victorian Europe. (I am using the term ‘Victorian’ here in the wider sense in which Carl Jung used it, to capture the flavour of the middle-class culture in all of Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.) What offended Victorian sensibilities in Freud’s work did not evidently offend the middle classes in India. Elsewhere, I have mentioned Rangin Halder, a pioneering Indian psychoanalyst who did a classical Freudian interpretation of the Oedipal imagery in Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry in the 1920s, when Tagore was already being regarded as a national poet and had become a revered figure in Indian public life. Such interpretations at the time primarily meant a heavy-handed exploration of psycho sexuality. Almost no one was offended, not even Tagore. And Halder, who first presented the paper to a small group of psychoanalysts, subsequently translated it into English and presented it at the annual meeting of the Indian Science Congress. It was a hit there, too.

What seems to be defiant in one cultural context may not seem so in another. A colleague once told me how her great-aunt — a seemingly house-bound, puritanical widow who had limited education and always wore white to conform to the traditional image of an austere widow in east India — helped her brother Sarasilal Sarkar, a first-generation psychoanalyst, to translate some of Freud’s works into Bengali. She was not at all shocked by the newly imported European theory of human nature, tinged with ideas of infantile sexuality and incestual fantasies. I remember in this context a number of Indian folk tales about the Oedipal situation collected by the poet and scholar A.K. Ramanujan. Many of them end rather tamely with the hero learning to live with the knowledge that he has unknowingly married or slept with his mother. There is moral anguish in them, but not usually of the fierce, self-destructive kind found in the Greek myth. In one story that carries a touch of moral agony, the mother is the one who commits suicide.[4]

Contemporary Indian middle-class culture, however, has more in common with the global culture of common sense than with the folk tales Ramanujan had collected. We have to come to these alternative formulations in a different way, by examining the status of the post-Galilean world itself. Let me, therefore, look more closely at some elements in the critical apparatus of Enlightenment reason that the global triumph of rationality, sanity and progress (encased in an expanding global culture of common sense and conventionality) should have given us the confidence to re-examine. Victory should have brought with it a new sense of self-confidence and responsibility, but evidently it has not.

The stalwarts who contributed to the Enlightenment vision tended to nurture one particular kind of critical attitude. That attitude used as its pivot, often creatively, the idea of demystification or unmasking. From Giambattista Vico to Sir Francis Bacon to Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, it was the creation and unfolding of a new tradition of social criticism that sought to rid the world of the sacred and the magical. That was the tradition on which the great critical theorists like Freud and Marx were to build. This tradition of demystification usually assumes that manifest reality, after a point, is not trustworthy. If one tears the mask off that reality, one is closer to the truth, or to more justifiable certitudes. After the demystification, the certitudes that sustain the manifest reality and supply its standardised interpretations are shown to be unsustainable. Indeed, through this exegesis, one constructs a new reality closer to truth, and that second-order reality provides one with a fresh bedrock of certitudes. It was the hope of the protagonists of this tradition that a new society, a new social vision, and even a new human personality could be built based on this new hermeneutics.

The model, of course, was borrowed from modern science. There, too, the assumption is that once someone like Galileo dismantles common sense and everyday reality by proposing the idea of a heliocentric universe in place of the geocentric one, he demystifies or demagicalises the universe and comes closer to truth. Likewise, the emergence of modern medicine can also be viewed as the emergence of a new narrative that sheds the earlier mystification of illness and explains all diseases solely in the language of the body, as formalised in the science of biology. The assumption is that once one reaches the hard realities encrypted in the language of the body, one acquires greater mastery over ill health. Similarly with the Marxist concept of production relations and Freud’s concept of psychosexuality.

There is another tacit assumption here. Namely, that there can be competing theories of knowledge, but not two truths. Ultimately, one of the theories is expected to supersede the rest. Take the case of the Galilean discovery itself, which has served as a foundational myth of modern knowledge systems for nearly two centuries. Only two years ago the Catholic Church recanted and apologised for prosecuting Galileo, a little too late in the day, some might say. Yet, a whole range of works which rely on the actual arguments and exchanges between the two sides make us suspect that the Church was not clear about the position it should take on Galileo’s cosmology. Galileo was influential and had powerful friends in the Church. During his trial, he stayed in an abbey with a Church dignitary. The Catholic Church, never insensitive to political realities, was willing to compromise. In any case, it was probably less hostile to Galileo’s heliocentric universe than to his belief that the Church should repudiate geocentricism and make heliocentricism a part of official Christian dogma. In other words, the Church was willing to keep things vague and open and live with both the heliocentric and geocentric theories as contestants for the status of truth. But the idea that there could be two coexisting, contesting versions of truth was not acceptable to Galileo. In his world, one of the two theories had to win at the end.

Today, in the age of supercomputers, it is possible to argue that in a relativistic universe, conceiving the sun as the epicentre is not that striking an improvement over conceiving the earth as the epicentre, if one chooses to confine oneself solely to the issue of truth. A reasonably good computer can calculate the co-ordinates of the geocentric universe clumsily and inelegantly, but nonethe less truthfully. I emphasise the word truthfully, because Galileo’s battle with the Church is described in school texts as a battle for truth. I admit that the computations in the case of a geocentric universe will be more complicated; they will certainly not be aesthetic or efficient. But they will not be false. For heliocentricism and geocentricism are only two possible ways of viewing a relativistic universe. There could be other ways. Any modern physicist will agree with you on this as long as you do not bring in Galileo. He or she will be uncomfort able the moment you propose that Galileo was as right or as wrong as the dignitaries of the Church were. Galileo’s dissent is a major myth of modernity, on which we have been brought up. To disown it is to disown a part of our selves.

The moral of the story is clear. What looks like radical dissent at one time may look like a lesser innovation at another, or become a lovely little story of dissent that has lost some of its edge. However, this also has a dangerous corollary: many ideas that were once instruments of liberation or parts of an emancipatory theory, which for decades came in handy for those battling social injustice or inequality, have ceased to be emancipatory. Perhaps for the simple reason that human beings, given enough time, are perfectly capable of converting even the most radical theories of emancipation into sanctions for new forms of violence and oppression. It is probably better to be suspicious of all theories of emancipation after a point. Indeed, I believe that the coming generations may seriously demand that any significant psychological or political theory, to be so recognised, must have either an element of self-destructiveness or a subsystem of self-criticism built in. It may not be good for the theorists, but it will certainly be good for the rest of the world. There is no harm in viewing all theories of liberation as transient instruments that retain the potentiality of becoming oppressive in the end.

Everyone knows of the demise of Leninism; few have noticed the demise of classical liberalism. Nothing reveals this twin defeat more poignantly than the changing language of the winners of the world. The new slogans of the victorious have gradually become those that the likes of Marx and Freud thought emancipatory. I have in mind the various theories of progress, science, rationality, social evolutionism and development. The Nazis killed in the name of eugenics, the Soviet communists in the name of scientific history. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia virtually acted out the dissertations that some of its leaders wrote for prestigious French universities. Values that at one time were associated with or indicated the defiance of authority are the values of the authorities today. Values that at one time looked authoritative and dominant have become the values of the marginalised and the powerless. We are moving into a world where the nature of authority is different. People at the heart of the Establishment today talk of the end of history, poverty and human rights. Obviously because the end history has reached is not the one for which generations of dissenting intellectuals have worked. Poverty has become a billion-dollar multinational enterprise and the idea of human rights is being exported by countries that have the shoddiest human rights record in the southern world. Nothing lasts forever; even dissent does not remain dissent after a point.

For us, who deal with human subjectivities, there is a more serious development in the wake of the crisis in modernity. The visions that presumed that individuality should provide the basic unit of social analysis and psychological intervention are themselves under severe stress. With individualism increasingly taking quasi pathological forms, strengthening individuality no longer looks like a foolproof recipe for health. A few years ago, I was told that in large apartment complexes in some Scandinavian cities, electronic devices were fitted in the toilets of lonely, elderly people. If a toilet was not flushed for a long stretch of time, the janitor came and broke into the apartment to check if the householder was alive. This was a response to instances of lonely senior citizens, deprived of community life, dying in their flats and the neighbours finding out only after the bodies began to decompose and smell. This is individualism taken to its logical conclusion. It is my suspicion that all theories of consciousness — and unconsciousness — will have to learn to look at the individual from a different point of view.

We do not have to give up the concept of individualism. We have seen what reified, overdone concepts of aggregates — such as race, class, nationality and ethnicity — can do. In the last century, mostly deriving sanction from deified or demonised concepts of groups, we killed 200 million of our fellow human beings. Their ghosts haunt all contemporary ideas of collectivity. I suggest that we re-examine individualism in societies where, in the name of individualism, certain basic dimensions of individuality have themselves been subverted. For most practical purposes, individualism has been reinterpreted as self-interest and consumer ism. The Internet now threatens to reinterpret it as solipsism. The advertisement-driven individual ism associated with consumer choice would have frightened even Sigmund Freud, whose individualism always had a Shakespearean dimension.

I once tried to calculate the number of shades of lipsticks on the world market. Within a short time, I arrived at a figure that ran into thousands. It is doubtful if the human retina is physiologically capable of registering that many shades of colour. I presume the width of this choice is partly bogus; it creates an illusion of wider choice than there actually is. It would have been a perfectly innocent illusion if the total cosmetics bill of American women had not over-stripped the total budgets of all the African countries taken together. For the moment, I am ignoring the quarter of a million animals sacrificed every year in US laboratories alone for scientific experiments, a significant proportion of them conducted for the cosmetics industry.[5] This is not a plea to abridge choice across the board; it is a plea to recognise that certain forms of absurd multiplication of choices can have psychosocial costs and can be considered puerile. I am merely taking seriously the activist-scholar R.L. Kumar’s proposition that the rhetoric of wider choice often hides the fact that in modern societies, an individual is increasing ly left with only three substantive choices: to be a tourist, a voter or a consumer. Other choices are usually either secondary or illusory. I am inviting you to extend to the favourite slogans of our times what Philip Rieff considers the heart of the Freudian enterprise, the analytic attitude.[6]

The very idea of the disenchantment of the world, so closely associated with the idea of demystification, is itself reaching the end of its tether. The world is getting so thoroughly secularised that the idea of a fully secular world has ceased to be an attractive dream, except to those still living in the nineteenth century. Two factors have contributed to the growing scepticism towards secularism. First, there is the growing environmental crisis, which to many seems intertwined with the secularisation of the cosmos and the desacralisation of nature and nonhuman life forms. If nothing is transcendent or sacred, the final word on social morality becomes the aphorism of John Maynard Keynes, who crucially shaped some of the major economic institutions with which we live: "In the long run we are all dead." If that is so, in a fully secularised, fully individualistic world, there is no reason why we should leave anything behind for the future. Certainly, institutions structured around self-interest, rationality and hard realism have even less reason to do so. A conventional wit, W.C. Fields puts it more directly and honestly: "Why should I think about the future? What has the future done for me?"

That is why many of the social formations that look like rebellions against secularism turn out to be, on closer scrutiny, the offspring of secularisation. Disoriented by a changing world, they desperately seek meaning in the packaged versions of faith vended by charlatans, gurus and bloodthirsty religious fanatics. I have been studying ethnic and religious violence during the last two decades. One of the most remarkable features of such violence, I find, is the element of secularisation that has crept into it. Religious fanaticism now has little to do with faith, tradition or community. It is a product of uprooting, breakdown of community ties and weakening of faith. Thus, expatriate Indians in the First World reportedly financed — almost entirely — the Ram Janmabhoomi movement that demolished the Babri mosque in India in 1992 and triggered countrywide violence. Likewise, expatriate Tamils have largely bankrolled Tamil militancy in Sri Lanka and the IRA has consistently received funding during the last seven decades from Irish Americans. It was almost as if individuals, feeling increasingly deracinated and uprooted, have taken up causes to battle their own sense of loss of tradition and community ties, and to create what Hannah Arendt used to call pseudo-communities.

If this explanation looks too facile, there is the fact that in all of South Asia, communal riots are becoming a kind of expertise, even a profession. You can organise ethnic or communal violence anytime you like, provided someone gives you enough cash and political protection. You can order a designer riot to bring down a regime or change voting patterns or advance the cause of a political faction. The activists are known, so are their fees and their political patrons. The leaders who deploy these activists are also increasingly blatant about their profession. Organised religious and ethnic violence itself has become one of the most secular spheres of our public life. That is why Mr L.K. Advani, the leader of what many consider the world’s biggest revivalist formation, the BJP Hindu nationalist forces in India, the man who headed the movement that led to the demolition of the Babri mosque, could openly say in an interview with The Times of India, a national newspaper, that he is not much of a believer. As for his own religious sentiments, he added for good measure, he feels closer to Sikhism than to Hinduism.

Advani is no exception. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or the RSS, the steel frame of Hindu nationalism, was established in 1925. It supposedly has a million members now. Many of them are believers. Yet, for most of its existence and throughout all its formative years, the RSS has not had as its head persons who could be called believers. The first time the RSS chose a believing Hindu as its head was when M.S. Golwalkar took over in 1940. The earlier leaders were not diffident non-believers; they openly flaunted their disbelief, often trying to show how scientifically minded they were by attacking Hindu rituals and idolatry. They believed that they were fighting for the political cause of the Hindus, not defending Hindu religious traditions. Thus V.D. Savarkar, who coined the term Hindutva and authored what has become the Bible of Hindu revivalism, Hindutva, declares himself an atheist in the same book. Evidently, the violent and venomous furies of religious fanaticism are not always associated with theories of transcendence in our time. They have been direct products of the modern, secular world and the time has come for us to re-examine such fanaticism as the pathology of a modern ideology rather than that of a faith.

At the end, very briefly, I offer two theoretical proposals that might serve as possible baselines for reconceptualising forms of contemporary subjectivity, especially as they are reflected in the idea of individuality. I choose them because both are indirectly relevant to theories of the healthy personality and psychotherapeutic practice.

First, healthy, normal individualism is also possible when the boundaries of the self are not as sharply demarcated in terms of belief, faith or identity, categories that the moderns feel comfortable with. Our deepening cross-cultural experiences demand that we redefine health to accommodate a different concept of the boundaries of the self. Let me give two examples, one of them my favourite. I can confidently predict that there will never be religious conflict between the Shintos and the Buddhists in Japan, for the simple reason that a huge majority of the Japanese are Shintos and a huge majority of them are Buddhists. A similar prediction can be made about the Confucians and the Buddhists in China. Whereas in a country like India, where a periodic modern, scientific census has been conducted since colonial times, the percentages of different religious communities are so meticulously calculated that they always add up to exactly 100 per cent. The Hindus constitute 82.0 per cent of India, the Muslims 12.1 per cent, the Christians 2.3 per cent, the Sikhs 1.9 per cent, and so on.

Yet, when the Indian Anthropological Survey did a comprehensive survey in the early 1990s, not of individuals but of communities, it discovered that roughly 15 per cent of the 2,800 communities studied had more than one faith. That does not only mean that these communities consist of people from different faiths; it also means that the communities include individuals who can be classified as belonging to more than one faith. This is not new for us. I have mentioned Japan and China. Even Christianity and Islam — faiths that have shed enormous volumes of blood to deter mine the fate of Jerusalem over the last two millennia — evidently have other incarnations in the tropics. The Indian survey mentions 116 communities that are simultaneously Christian and Hindu, 94 that follow both Christianity and the various ‘tribal religions’, and 35 that are Hindu and Muslim. Seventeen communities are followers of three religions simultaneously — 11 can be classified as Hindu, Muslim and Sikh, six as Hindu, Muslim and Christian.[7] A colleague of mine has studied the Meos, one of the largest Muslim communities in northern India. They are devoutly Muslim, but also trace their origins to the Mahabharata clans. They have their own Mahabharata that they perform ritually. Even now, some elderly Meos have both Hindu and Muslim names, the way a huge majority of the Indonesians do.[8]

It is possible to re-envision individualism, self-identity, and even the borders of the self. Some points of departure are available and it is our responsibility to confront the violence of our age by pursuing these possibilities. We also have to remember that the communities that have kept alive these possibilities, despite enormous pressures to change or conform, are a beleaguer ed lot. The forces of globalisation and cultural homogenis ation threaten their lifestyles. Take the case of the Meos. Muslim fundamentalists, Islamic nationalists and many modern Muslims have not been comfortable with Meo religious culture. Many Meos, too, having been victims of religious violence on and off during the last fifty years, now feel that their Islam is flawed. Indeed, Professor K. Suresh Singh, who headed the Indian Anthropolog ical Survey’s study of communities, tells me that the multi-religious communities revealed by his survey are the last remnants of a phenomenon that was once much more widespread in the region. They have ceased to be the norm in India, as in other parts of South and Southeast Asia. The official, enumerative world in which we live has no respect for such traditions. It works with a more Cartesian concept of the individual self.

I reaffirm that there are possible ways of looking at the person to which the modern world has few clues. These possible ways cannot be explained away as mystificat ions or as romantic invocations of the past. Indeed, it is we who have been living in a make-believe world that ignores other concepts of the boundaries of the self with which a huge proportion, perhaps even a majority of the world, still lives. The new slave trade flourishing in our times, with the full support of a large cross-section of the intellectual community, exports such people from our neighbourhoods to history. We talk about them in the past tense and accuse anyone concerned about them of incurable romanticism.

Secondly, not only can the self be seen as being in dialogue with others, as most currently fashionable theories of multiculturalism have come to acknowledge, the self can also be seen in the other and the other as telescoped in the self. This is not unheard of in clinical literature. There are studies that explain homicidal hatred towards outgroups as an attempt to exorcise alien parts of the self, the ghosts within. From the beginning, projection and displacement have been important defences in psychological studies of racism and ethnophobia. However, the healthier, more integrative possibilities in the story have not been explored The same defences of projection and displacement can sometimes bond diverse communities within a shared cultural space.[9] As I have already said, the Enlightenment’s tradition of demystification bares the material, the corporeal, the unhealthy and the ‘ugly’. It undervalues forms of second-order demystification that might reveal the sources of creativity and psychological health that underlie manifest ill health.

Recently, I studied a city in South India, Cochin, where at least fourteen major communities have lived for centuries. It is a small city which was cosmopolitan and international much before the present idea of cosmopolitanism was imported into India in colonial times. The communities range from two Jewish communities, one of which claims to have been in the region for more than two millennia, to Yemeni Arabs, who claim that they were in touch with Cochin even in pre-Islamic times, to the Eurasian Parangis who came into being as a community only in the last four hundred-odd years. These communities live there and have lived there in peace. I studied the city to learn how.[10]

It took me some time to find out that their co-existence was not dependent on brotherly love. The communities were often ambivalent towards each other; sometimes they positively disliked the other. But while they did so, no person or community considered itself complete without the others. Cochin lives in what I have elsewhere called an epic culture, not a linear, empirical, historical concept of culture and community. In that epic vision of life, you need villains to complete the picture, though these villains are usually fashioned out of the same defensive structures that students of ethnic and religious violence have come to fear.[11] Such a vision has to reaffirm, ritually and regularly, the existing configur ation of the contests between the godly and the ungodly. You simply cannot do without the demons because you cannot even represent the gods without the demons. They are symbiotic al ly related and are an unavoidable part of each other and your self. You do not have to love the demons, but you cannot nurture annihilatory fantasies about them either. It is a bit like the story of the Jewish Robinson Crusoe who, I am told, had to build two synagogues, one to pray in and the other to set up as the one into which he would never step. The second synagogue was important to him. He might have hated it, but his self-definition was not complete without it

During the last two centuries, in the area of social knowledge and knowledge of self, we have managed to destroy such visions by bringing in a peculiar evolutionary perspective on the relation between space and time. That perspective has drawn upon the various nineteenth-century theories of progress to convert geographies into histories, histories into geographies. At one time, one had the right to dislike other communities because they did not conform to one’s ideas of morality and propriety. However, usually one was forced to yield to the others, even if unwilling ly, the same right to dislike one. It is no longer fashionable to exercise such rights or to own up to such prejudices. The triumphant culture of globalised cosmopolitanism has convinced us that we must pretend, even if we do not believe so, that everyone is the same. Yet, the same cosmo politan ism allows us to classify cultures according to the distance they have traversed on the time-scale of history. So, I may not detest you — as representing a culture, a religion, nationality or ethnic group — but I retain the right to believe that you are what I was yesterday or in the last century. And if you behave well, if you obey the textbooks I have produced on self-improvement — through economic development, technological growth, acquisition of scientific rationality or ‘proper’ political education — you could be like me tomorrow. It is like Albert Schweitzer’s idea of fraternity, as recalled by Chinua Achebe. "The African is my brother," Schweitzer appears to have said, "but a younger brother." Only this idea, which today infects virtually all liberal and radical theories of social change, is apparently an improvement on Immanuel Kant’s or David Hume’s belief in the natural inferiority of the blacks, browns and yellows.

For in Schweitzer’s view, some cultures are only living out the pasts of others and are, to that extent, obsolete and redundant. A few cynics may claim that this is a way of pre-empting the future of some of the oldest civilisations of the world and annihilating the present of hundreds of humble micro-cultures that keep open our options by acting like cultural gene banks of alternative, dissenting or even fantastic concepts of selfhood. But that is certainly not a popular view in the mainstream global culture of common sense.

I am optimistic enough to believe that the new century will define the capacity to listen to others as a major human virtue. An earlier generation of psychotherapists spoke of the need to listen with a third ear. Perhaps the next generation, less burdened by the ghosts of yesteryear, will not be embarrassed to speak of the need to listen with a second heart.

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Notes:

This essay draws on the author’s keynote address at the International Congress of the International Association of Group Psychotherapy, Jerusalem, 2000

1. See a more detailed discussion in Ashis Nandy, ‘The Savage Freud: The First Non-Western Psychoanalyst and the Politics of Secret Selves in Colonial India’, in The Savage Freud and Other Essays in Possible and Retrievable Selves (New Delhi: OUP, 1995).

2. Friedrich Heer, ‘Freud, the Viennese Jew’, tr W. A. Littlewood, in Jonathan Miller (ed.), Freud, The Man, His World, His Influence (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1972).

3. Christiane Hartnack, ‘Psychoanalysis and Colonialism in British India’, PhD dissertation, Berlin, Freie Universität, 1988; Ashis Nandy, ‘The Savage Freud’ (see above).

4. A. K. Ramanujan, ‘The Indian Oedipus’, in T. G. Vaidyanathan and Jeffrey Kripal (eds.), Vishnu on Freud’s Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). See also Gananath Obeysekere, ‘Further Steps in Relativisation: The Indian Oedipus Revisited’, Ibid.

5. Shiv Visvanathan, ‘Annals of a Laboratory State’, A. Nandy,
Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity (New Delhi: Oxford University Press and Tokyo: UN University Press).

6. Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (New York: Harper, 1968).

7. K. S. Singh, People of India: An Introduction (New Delhi: Anthropological Survey of India, 1994), Vol. 1.

8. Shail Mayaram, Resisting Regimes: Myth and Memory in a Muslim Community (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1997).

9. Shail Mayaram, ‘Living Together: Ajmer as a Paradigm of the Asiatic City’, in Kayoko Tatsumi (ed.), Multiculturalism: Modes of Coexistence in South and Southeast Asia (Washington: SPF, 1998), mimeo. This paper unwittingly and, therefore, unselfconsciously shows the involvement of two of the classical concerns of psychoanalytic anthropology — possession and psychic healing — in an Islamic mosque shared by Muslims and Hindus, and presided over by an unlikely Imam, a woman called Sushila Rohatgi.

10. See Ashis Nandy, ‘Time Travel to a Possible Self: Searching for the Alternative Cosmopolitanism of Cochin’, The Japanese Journal of Political Science, December 2000, 1(2).

11. Cf. Vamik D. Volkan, The Need to Have Enemies and Allies (New York: Jason Aronson, 1988).

Democracy in Arab World

Yes, we still support Arab autocracy

by Bradley Glasser [Asia Times Online: Jan 15, 2005]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GA15Ak04.html


Since September 11, 2001, Western governments have articulated a breathtaking vision of democratic reform in the Arab world. Government officials, with the support of myriad policy wonks and pundits, have embraced the idea of Western support for a democratic transformation of the Middle East. Western officialdom has argued that a democratic boom in the region would alleviate the discontent that fuels terrorism and fanaticism in the Arab and Islamic worlds.

This post-September 11 interest in democracy-promotion in the Middle East is supposed to mark a reversal of decades-old Western support for Middle Eastern dictatorships. The Bush administration has touted this apparent transformation in US policy toward the region in countless policy addresses and campaign speeches in 2003 and 2004. (Indeed, in a November 2003 speech, President George W Bush apologized for American support for Middle Eastern dictatorships over the last 50 years.) And the official rhetoric has seemingly been matched by a concerted policy effort among Western powers.

At the June 2004 Group of Eight Summit at Sea Island, Georgia, the US and European governments presented a Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative, which outlined a common US-European framework for democracy-promotion in the Middle East. The initiative created a global forum for the discussion of Middle Eastern political reform, and created a fund for democracy-promotion activities throughout the Arab world.

Most Arab rulers have rejected the imperialist overtones of Western democracy-promotion in the region, and indeed the Arab media have by and large denounced Western efforts to reshape Arab political systems. At the same time, the Western initiative has sparked some debate on political reform in Arab societies, and has pushed Arab governments to acknowledge the need to open up their polities. A few states like Jordan and Morocco have even indicated their willingness to work with Western donors on democracy-promotion.

Sadly, the grandiose Western proclamations and the impassioned Arab debate simply obscure a stifling global consensus that will militate against genuine Arab democratization for the foreseeable future. Overwhelmingly, rhetoric aside, Western governments - including the Bush administration - seem to agree with Arab rulers on a critical point: in general, the authoritarian stability of the existing Arab order should be maintained; at best, Arab and Western governments are considering exceedingly cosmetic political reforms that alleviate domestic discontent and present a positive face to the international community.

Here the confusion - whereby the American media and public assume the US government is pushing for genuine democracy from Morocco to Egypt to the Arab Gulf - stems from the critical distinction between political liberalization and democratization. For more than a decade, the US and the European Union have invested comparatively trivial sums in political liberalization programs in Arab countries. Such aid programs have sought to support civil-society groups seeking greater political participation, or have had a technical orientation that sought, for example, to upgrade the infrastructure of the justice and parliamentary systems in countries like Egypt and Jordan.

What the democracy aid projects of the 1990s did not do was pressure the various rulers to share power in any meaningful way: to allow free and fair parliamentary elections, or to ease the overwhelming institutional power of the ruling parties (in the Arab republics) or of the ruling families (in the Arab monarchies), or to roll back the brutal dictatorial powers of the Arab state. The trivial scope of the democracy aid has reflected the traditional American and European interest in preserving geopolitical stability in the Middle East. For decades, of course, Western governments have preferred to ally themselves with friendly Arab dictators who would guarantee the flow of Middle Eastern oil and keep anti-Western radicals at bay. In designing the democracy aid projects in the 1990s, American and European policy-makers assumed that marginal reforms - enacted at a glacial pace - might enable Arab regimes to ease popular discontent and in turn work to prevent anti-Western revolutions (as occurred in Iran, for example).

The post-September 11 Western approach to Arab reform is essentially the same one employed so ineffectually in the 1990s, notwithstanding the deafening and misleading rhetoric. Indeed, Western-sponsored reforms have perversely worked to enhance the legitimacy of the Arab rulers: enabling them to project a "democratic" facade to their domestic critics and to the international community. In Egypt and Jordan in the 1990s, for example, while aid flowed, human-rights conditions actually deteriorated and the rulers further marginalized their political opponents.

At first glance, some current American and European reform initiatives seem worthwhile. In recent months, for example, the US State Department has highlighted a new Middle East Partnership (MEPI), which will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Arab reform, broadly defined. In Bahrain last September, MEPI sponsored a judicial reform conference for 200 representatives of Arab justice ministries. Conference participants discussed various aspects of Western judicial practice, including judicial ethics, the recruitment of judges and court administration. The premise of the State Department is that such promotion of Westernized notions of "the rule of law" will contribute to the eventual democratization and Westernization of Middle Eastern polities. That may - or may not - be the case in the long run, as Arab officials absorb Western political and legal values in the coming decades.

But in the short and medium term, the current Western aid projects do nothing more than burnish and enhance the repressive status quo. Since Arab rulers thoroughly dominate their judiciaries and parliaments, the upgrading of judicial and parliamentary procedures mean little or nothing - at least in terms of genuine democratization. Indeed, the aid projects enable rulers to claim that they are democratizing and modernizing, while political conditions in fact continue to deteriorate in major Arab states.

In the end, Western governments may well have little or no power to promote substantial reforms in Arab countries. But given the failures of the gradualist aid approach in the past decade or so, only a more aggressive policy - that of political conditionality - has any hope of contributing to real democratization in the region. In other words, the provision of foreign aid and the expansion of trade ties should be conditioned on genuine political liberalization and democratization. Such progress would include meeting well-defined benchmarks in terms of respecting human rights and press freedoms, allowing free and fair parliamentary elections, and the implementation of constitutional curbs on executive power.

Arab rulers may well refuse to participate in such an intrusive program. But even that eventuality would be preferable to the current "democracy" activities, which simply seem to perpetuate a dangerous and dysfunctional status quo.

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Bradley Glasser is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of Economic Development and Political Reform: The Impact of External Capital on the Middle East (Edward Elgar, 2001).

[Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.]

Holocaust Commemoration

Remember What? Remember How?

by Uri Avnery [from Counter Currents]

http://www.countercurrents.org/avnery220305.htm

22 March, 2005.


From the well-chosen - as usual - words from Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Minister, to the tortured - as usual - face of Eli Wiesel, the Holocaust professional, it was an appropriate commemoration of the historic crime.


But it was also a great victory for Israeli diplomacy. The chiefs of our Foreign Office openly boasted of this political achievement. The foreign guests met with the Israeli leaders and thus lent their indirect but clear support to Ariel Sharon’s policy.


Altogether, it underlined the ambiguity of the Holocaust commemoration at this time.


When one of the leading Nazis imprisoned in Nuremberg first learned the full dimensions of the Holocaust, he exclaimed: “This will not be forgotten for a thousand years!” He was right. The Holocaust was indeed a unique crime in history.


It is difficult for foreigners to understand that for us in Israel the Shoah is not just a thing of the past. It is a part of the present. An example: at the time of the museum opening, I was flying back from Europe. In the airplane I got into conversation with an Israeli professor I had not known before, and he told me about the various stages of his life. I noticed that he passed quickly over several years of his childhood. When I asked him, be told me that he had been in Theresienstadt. He did not go into detail, so I did not ask what happened to his family.


From the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, most prisoners were sent on to the death camps. My aunt committed suicide there, her husband was sent from there to Auschwitz and was never heard of again. I remember this uncle laughing when my father decided to flee from Germany in 1933. “What can happen to us here?” he asked, “After all, Germany is a civilized country!”


The impact of the Holocaust is not restricted to the generation of the survivors. A young writer once told me that both her parents had spent time in the death camps. “I did not know that,” she recounted, “They never spoke about it. But when I was a child, I knew there was an awful secret in our family, a secret so terrible that it was forbidden to ask about it. That filled my whole childhood world with dread. Even now I still feel anxious and insecure.”


Almost every day we hear stories that are connected with the Shoah. One cannot escape it. One should not try to escape it, either. Forgetting the Holocaust is a kind of betrayal of the victims.


The question is: HOW to remember? WHAT to remember?


After World War II, the Shoah became the center of Jewish consciousness. Yeshayahu Leibovitz, the philosopher who was an observant orthodox Jew, told me once: “The Jewish religion died 200 years ago. Now there is nothing that unifies the Jews around the world apart from the Holocaust.” That is natural, because every Jew knows that if he had fallen into the hands of the Nazis, his life would probably have ended in a gas chamber. We, in Palestine at the time, were quite close to that when the German Afrika Corps under Erwin Rommel approached the gates of our country.


There was no need for a conclave of the Elders of Zion in order to turn the Holocaust into a central instrument in the struggle for the creation of Israel. It was self-evident. The Zionists had argued right from the beginning that in the modern world there can be no existence for the Jews without a state of their own. The Shoah lent this argument an irresistible force.


It caused the Jews in the State of Israel, which was created in war and had to fight for its life, to crave total security, and so we became a military power. It is impossible to understand both the good and the bad in Israel without taking into account the impact of the Shoah on our national and personal consciousness. It was none other than the late Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, who told this to his compatriots.


The centrality of the Holocaust in Jewish consciousness caused the Jews to insist on its absolute exclusiveness. We are shocked and furious when somebody tries to remind us that the Nazis exterminated other communities too, such as the Roma, the homosexuals and the mentally ill. We get very angry when somebody comes and compares “our” Holocaust with other genocides: Armenians, Cambodians, Tutsis in Ruanda and others. Really! How can one compare?


The Holocaust was indeed unique in many respects. Nothing compares with the organized extermination of a whole people by industrial means, with the participation of all the organs of a modern state. It may be that Stalin murdered no fewer, and perhaps even more human beings than Hitler, but his victims were drawn from all the peoples and classes of the Soviet Union, and were not subjected to a process of industrialized extermination.


But the concept of the exclusiveness of the Holocaust can lead to despicable perversions. Many among us argue that no moral restraints apply to us, because “after what they did to us” nobody can teach us what is or is not permitted. “After the Shoah” we have the duty to do everything to save Jewish lives, even by ignoble means. We are allowed to use the memory of the Holocaust as an instrument of our foreign policy, since Israel is the “state of the Holocaust survivors”. We are allowed to stifle all criticism of our behavior, since it is self-evident that all critics are anti-Semites. We are allowed to blow up every insignificant incident, such as the painting a swastika on a Jewish tombstone, in order to prove that “anti-Semitism is on the rise” in the world and raise the alarm.


I want to argue that now, 60 years after the end of the Holocaust, it is time to grow out of all this.The time has come to turn the memory of the Holocaust from an exclusively Jewish property into a world-wide human possession.


The mourning, the anger and the shame must be turned into a universal message against all forms of genocide.


The struggle against anti-Semitism must become a part of the fight against all kinds of racism, whether directed against Muslims in Europe or Blacks in America, Kurds in Turkey or Palestinians in Israel, or foreign workers everywhere.


The Jews’ long history as the victims of murderous persecution must not cause us to wrap ourselves in a cult of self-pity, but, on the contrary, should encourage us to take the lead in the world-wide struggle against racism, prejudice and stereotypes that begin with incitement by vile demagogues and can end in genocide.


Such a people would truly be “a light unto the nations.”

Nepal-India-Bangladesh

India Grapples with Specter of Failing States

by Sultan Shahin [from Asia Times]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GB15Df01.html


NEW DELHI - For the past five years or more, India was almost exclusively obsessed with facing threats from Pakistan. Also, it has been busy promoting its emerging "big power status" and lobbying for a permanent veto-wielding United Nations Security Council seat. Playing its "rightful role" in world affairs was the goal. Now suddenly, it is seized with the nightmarish vision of two potentially failing steps on its eastern doorstep, one likely to be soon overrun by Maoists with links to Indian radicals of the same hue, and the other dominated by Islamic fundamentalists with links to al-Qaeda and Pakistani extremists. Indeed, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is also predicting that Pakistan could be a failed state by 2015.

India seems not to know how to respond to events unfolding in Nepal and Bangladesh. Right-wing opposition is pillorying the government for what it calls its knee-jerk reactions. But some good may come out of this as New Delhi focuses its sights closer home. The Ministry of External Affairs has, however, promised to come out with its South Asian strategy soon.

When Nepal's King Gyanendra seized power on February 1, India reacted angrily, according to its first impulses; democratic, as democracy had been trampled on; and super-powerish, as its specific advice to the king not to go ahead with the widely suspected coup had been ignored, thus challenging India's pre-eminent status in the region.

Much sanctimonious posturing and pretentious outrage ensued. A regional summit meeting was postponed as a democratic leader of India couldn't be seen shaking hands with a constitutional monarch who had assumed power, put political leaders under house arrest, jailed journalists and suspended civil liberties. A planned visit of the army chief was also canceled.

Now the democratic impulse has run its course, super-powerish rage has subsided, and a sense of reality has set in. New Delhi cannot afford to disengage with Nepal and thus leave the door open for China and Pakistan to step in and perhaps establish a permanent military presence on India's northeastern borders. Following in the footsteps of China and Pakistan, therefore, India's Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee, too, has called the developments an internal matter of Nepal. India said last Wednesday its response to the recent developments in Nepal would be dictated by the clout of the Maoists agitating for the abolition of the monarchy in the Himalayan kingdom.

A meeting of the Indo-Nepal joint security group that was to be held later this month to work out details of supplies that the Royal Nepal Army (RNA) needs has now been called off. But speaking in his capacity as a member of the Cabinet Committee on Security, the defense minter said, "We recognize that if the security situation [in Nepal] deteriorates due to increased Maoist influence, it will heighten our own internal security threat. It is not an ordinary thing if they [Maoists] increase their influence and strength in the neighboring Himalayan kingdom. If Maoist activity is not constrained, this may cause problems to us." Mukherjee explained, "There is extremist activity in a large number of our states. Because of the porous border, there is a threat perception that once they [Maoists] exert more influence in Nepal, there will be an impact here. Our policy will be keeping that in view."

Already, fearing a crackdown following the assumption of all powers by Gyanendra, a number of senior political leaders and activists have slipped into India's bordering states, Uttaranchal, West Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand, causing a lot of concern among security agencies. Some cadres of the Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) have reportedly sneaked into West Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand, where they could indulge in extortion and get into clashes with other Maoist groups.

According to a report submitted by the intelligence agencies to the Home Ministry, CPN cadres had slipped through the porous India-Nepal border and could be now engaged in extortion rackets in Jharkhand and Bihar. The presence of CPN cadres has the potential to spark bloody clashes with the Maoist Communist Center (MCC) and the People's War Group (PWG), which already operate in the two states and are engaged in extortion rackets themselves. In fact, there have already been some reports of clashes between the CPN and the MCC, but none have turned too ugly so far.

It seems India's military relationship with Nepal is also not going to be affected as a result of the monarch's coup. Revealing that the Nepal army had sent a communique to the Indian army seeking continuance of friendly relations, Mukherjee said India had responded "along the same lines". He continued, "The missive did not specifically seek additional arms and equipment to counter the Maoists and India had stated that close bilateral military ties should continue. We have a long-standing relationship with the RNA. That relationship stands.

"The RNA wanted reiteration of the same policy," added the defense minister, number two in India's government hierarchy. And, of course, India has obliged. India recently supplied helicopters, mine-proof vehicles, guns and ammunition to the RNA to counter the Maoists. A second tranche reportedly is in the offing, but the minister did not specify whether it would go through in the present circumstances or whether specific requests for any military hardware had been made.


The Bangladesh headache

New Delhi shows similar ambivalence and what its critics term "cluelessness" in dealing with the other potentially failing state, on its eastern border, the Islamic Republic of Bangladesh. The National Awami Party-led and Islamic fundamentalist-supported government of Prime Minister Khaleda Zia keeps thumbing its nose at India, allowing Indian rebels from northeastern states a sanctuary, though constantly denying their presence, and allowing militants to make assassination bids on secular leaders who campaign for friendship with secular, democratic India.

Former prime minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed, the only surviving daughter of the father of Bangladesh liberation and former prime minister Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, barely survived an assassination attempt last August, and the widely respected former finance minister in her government, Shah A S Kibria, was killed in an Islamist bomb attack on his political rally a couple of weeks ago.

In its bid to work out a coherent policy toward these neighbors, in whose functioning as normal, secular democratic states India has a great stake, impinging on its own long-term security, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is at present focused on two primary questions, sources in the government told Asia Times Online.

One, should the government adopt a carrot or/and stick policy, and to what measure toward whom? Two, should New Delhi try to solve these problems through a bilateral or a multilateral approach involving the United Nations, or world powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom, and/or regional powers like China and Pakistan?

In the context of the first question, some sections in the government have resurrected the love doctrine of depending on carrots propounded and implemented for some time by former prime minister Inder Kumar Gujral. This is also known as the Gujral doctrine. Gujral is a former congressman who led a government in the mid-1990s very much similar to the present UPA government in its orientation and support structure, except that the Congress Party then was supported from outside. He had started implementing it as a foreign minister in an earlier Deve Gowda-led government of what was then a "third front" supported by the Congress Party.

The Gujral doctrine primarily stood for India as a big power being magnanimous in its dealings with smaller neighbors and not to expect reciprocity from them every time it gave them a concession. It was very successful in earning the respect and affection of the smaller South Asian neighbors that surround India. As President General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan told this correspondent at a luncheon table in Lahore a couple of months ago, when a smaller country makes a unilateral concession it is considered a surrender to big-power politics, but when the same gesture is shown by a big power, it is called generosity and magnanimity. Clearly, there are many takers for the Gujral doctrine in India's complex neighborhood.

The one time India was genuinely popular in the neighborhood, as the Times of India wrote in one of its editorials some time ago, was during the short stint of Gujral of the socialist Janata Dal, who was sensitive to the fears of smaller neighbors. The Gujral doctrine of assisting neighbors without expecting them to reciprocate was criticized by hawks in the establishment for giving in to pressure from India's smaller neighbors, but obviously it proved the more successful policy. The newspaper reminded its readers that India had a reasonably good relationship with all its neighbors before the Hindu fundamentalist Bhartiya Janata Party-led coalition government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee took office in 1998.

The Vajpayee government theorized that India would be better able to project its big-power status on the world scene if it succeeded in making its neighbors fear India's military power, and thus respect its dictates. But the near-contempt with which even the smallest and weakest of its neighbors treat India makes it clear that the sticks-only policy failed. Most distressingly for many observers, these neighbors, like Nepal and Bangladesh, are on the verge of becoming failed states and are almost wholly dependent on India for their survival. They are called "India-locked" due to their multiple dependencies on India for a variety of geopolitical reasons. And yet they neither love nor fear India.

Hawkish supporters of the Hindu fundamentalist doctrine explain the failure of this policy by complaining that Vajpayee did not implement it fully. For instance, India never bombed insurgents and civilian areas where they may be hiding in Kashmir or the northeast from the air in the manner of the US in Iraq or Russia in Chechnya or Israel with the Palestinians. How then could India expect to be feared by its insurgents and neighbors, they ask.

Right-wing columnist Swapan Dasgupta, for instance, comments, "King Gyanendra's faith in his own leadership may well be misplaced, but the South Asian experience suggests that non-ethnic insurgencies are rarely settled by following democratic niceties. The Naxalites [Maoists] in West Bengal, the Khalistanis in Punjab and the JVP [People's Liberation Front] in Sri Lanka were defeated by meticulous military operations that violated every clause of the human-rights charter. Saving democracy entailed putting democracy on the back-burner."

Mainstream India is, however, wiser by experience. Even half a million soldiers have not been able to pacify Kashmiri insurgency, despite cross-border infiltration having come to a virtual halt for nearly a year and a half. Neither has the US been successful in Iraq, nor the Russians in Chechnya, nor the Israelis in Palestine, despite the unrestricted use of brute force for years. With three-fourths of Nepal already under Maoist control, and vast masses of people on their side, the Nepalese king, with his 80,000 soldiers, who were primarily palace guards, though recently equipped with modern weapons by India and the US, hardly stand a chance of success in the near future.

Academic Pratap Bhanu Mehta takes a more balanced approach. His diagnosis and lament: "A great power ought to be loved or feared, or both. We do not offer carrots that are attractive enough for our neighbors to love us; our stick is not strong enough for them to fear us. We yet again helplessly watch Nepal drift by. We do not appear to have the military capabilities to transplant democracy or bring the Maoists to heel. Nor do we have other forms of soft power to greatly influence the outcome. We once again are left to pick up the pieces."

On the question of whether to take a bilateral or a multilateral approach, almost the entire media and a good chunk of intelligentsia advise the government to take a multilateral approach, and globalize the conflict in Nepal, as well as the growing Islamist threat in Bangladesh. India has, however, traditionally disliked the idea of international intervention in the South Asian region, which it considers its own turf. Inviting others would be an admission of failure on its part, it is felt by large sections in the bureaucracy. It was only with reluctance and rather a sense of helplessness that Delhi recently acknowledged US forces as having a role to play in providing relief in tsunami-hit Sri Lanka.

There is strong resistance in the government to thinking about South Asian security in multilateral terms. Taking the Kashmir dispute to the UN has not been a good experience for India. Until today, Kashmiri secessionists and their backers in Pakistan waved UN resolutions of 1948 in front of Indian eyes to prove their points, even though Musharraf seems to have realized their irrelevance in the present context. So go-it-alone would be the preferred policy for many in the government.

India's largest-circulation newspaper, The Times of India, is the most unequivocal in advising a multilateral approach. In a comment typical of editorials in other mainstream newspapers it says, "It is time for New Delhi to shed its customary ambiguity and address the problem head-on. But first we must get over our go-it-alone mindset. In today's globalizing world, no one should consider geography crucial to its strategic influence. So, it would be in India's interest to internationalize the Nepal crisis and try to win over as many nations as possible to our point of view. It is imperative that India take the issue up at the UN and lobby to work out a consensus on the best way to restore democracy in Nepal. As we have seen, Beijing, Islamabad and Dhaka have been trying to fish in troubled waters by insisting that the king's abolition of democracy is an internal matter for Nepal. Bangladesh, ever eager to put India down, has added its voice to this chorus. If we were to bring up the issue at the UN, China, Pakistan and Bangladesh would be hard put to explain why they support a move inimical to democracy. It would also expose their own undemocratic systems of government as being the reason for their energetic espousal of King Gyanendra's action."

While resistance from foreign-policy mandarins is palpable, the Times of India's comment seems to represent a cross-section of public opinion in India, which is disgusted at the royal coup, particularly because this king is not as popular as the previous ones, except in Hindu fundamentalist circles that have come out in his support and are demanding that India go out of the way to support him.

The paper continues, giving voice to what can be expected to be general opinion in the country: "Our focus should be on getting King Gyanendra to revert to his position as a constitutional monarch since New Delhi accepts that the two pillars of governance in Nepal are the monarchy and the political parties. India should help enable the Nepalese people to voice their opinion on what sort of political system they would like, and whether the monarchy has a valid role to play in it. Meanwhile, we should put pressure on the king by cutting off the arms supplies which we have so generously provided in the past. But under no circumstances should New Delhi be seen to do anything detrimental to the people of this desperately poor nation. Any verdict we are able to secure in the UN cannot be dismissed lightly by an already isolated king. This will ensure a speedy, and hopefully lasting, solution to the Kathmandu crisis."

At the moment of writing, however, it is not at all clear as to what approach the government will take. Its traditional ambiguity continues to dominate the debate, in the absence of a strong and decisive leader like former prime minister Indira Gandhi, who is missed in such moments of crisis. Manmohan Singh is still an unknown entity, though many are drawing comparisons with him and Gujral, hailing as both do from the mystical land of Punjab. Wishful thinking though it may be, some are hoping that this soft-spoken scholar-politician will follow India's first prime minister and pre-eminent leader of his Congress Party Jawaharlal Nehru's multilateral approach, and his fellow Punjabi intellectual-politician Gujral's love-thy-neighbor doctrine. His moves in the next few days will be watched with great interest and some trepidation.


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Sultan Shahin is a New Delhi-based writer.

[Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.]